What Makes a Smart Engineer? The Cultural Practice of Smartness in First-Year Engineering Classrooms

• In Event: AERA Poster Session 1
  In Poster Session: Computational Thinking and the Learner and Educator Experience (San Diego)

Abstract

Common public messaging promotes the narrative that to be an engineer, one must be smart. The pervasiveness of this narrative is problematic because who gets counted as smart in our educational systems is biased. To disrupt smartness as a gatekeeping force in engineering, we must investigate how smartness is constructed at individual and sociocultural levels. Analyzing parts of two rounds of interviews with undergraduate engineering students, we developed 11 dimensions of being smart in engineering and found significant differences in 6 of the dimensions between what students believe are valuable and what they believe is recognized as smart in their engineering classroom. Considerations around smartness and its impact are essential for cultivating equitable educational systems within engineering.

Authors

• Amy Kramer, The Ohio State University - Columbus

• Emily Dringenberg, The Ohio State University - Columbus

• Rachel Louis Kajfez, The Ohio State University